A Little Bit More: “Extras” Now Up On All Major Platforms

2024 has nearly nearly gone. I’ve been surprisingly busy for someone not supposed to be busy. It’s been a pretty hectic time, so much so I forgot to let people here know about a new Wescin Rocks Records project that is, by this point, already long out.

As you know to date the main focus has been on the Last Minute Chilled series. This has been a series of two (actually now three at the time of writing) volumes featuring lo-fi, downtempo and/or chilled hip-hop tracks based around the games we’ve streamed on our Twitch channel. Well, that and a few other bits and pieces. And while we’ve got a lot of variety there are some games where I was interested in doing a second track. Likewise there were some games we’ve not streamed where I’m particularly fond of certain tracks, or just wanted to see what could be done. 

THE TRACKS:

1) “Connected” for Watch Dogs 

This is one of those tracks that I’ve been waiting to release for some time, and given the apparent situation with the Watch Dogs franchise, I guess this is appropriate timing.

One of my favourite things about the original Watch_Dogs – you know, when it had a random underscore in it – was the story of DeadSec member Clara Lille. Clara, a.k.a BadBoy17, is Aiden’s ally, confident and (sort of) love interest. Except she’s got a secret: she’s responsible for handing over the information that got Aiden’s niece killed and is desperately trying to make up for it. In the end it costs her her life. Combining Clara’s last phone message with the spirit of Clara’s Theme plus some other sound cues from Watch Dogs we get a sad slow beat that hints at the tragedy and regret of the character.

2) “Two Forks In The Road” for Firewatch

Firewatch remains one of my favourite games and one of my favourite let’s plays for the website. Two Forks In The Road takes its influence from Throughfare Hike, I put it when we were creating the track that the feel was like you’d gotten in the back of a bus and as you drive away you think back to the Summer that was.  

3) “Wash Away The Pain” for Turrican II: The Final Fight

At the time of writing, I’ve surprisingly not played Turrican II yet on stream. I’ve been very vocal down the years about my love of the title which I played on the Atari ST as a kid. I even waxed lyrical about the game for a LONG time on a recent Radio Redux episode where we talked about our best games ever. The track I brought up there was The Great Bath, the music for the underwater level that was always so very chill – which started when you entered the water and stopped the second you got out. Allowing you to gloriously screw around., jumping in and out of the the transition point.

The end track, whose name refers to title character Bren McGuire and their quest for vengeance after their entire crew, used influences from all sorts of versions of The Great Bath down the years. Including both version I heard as a kid, the Anthology version and the symphonic version.

4) “Shrouded In Silk” for Miraculous: Rise Of The Sphinx

In the daytime… this is an example of us not getting around to the a game’s appearance in the Chilled series. (Wait for Volume 3.) Yet me wanting to do an extra track for it anyway.

I’ll be totally honest the Miraculous game was nothing to write home about and the soundtrack even less so, outside of some elements of the TV series’ incidental music that made it in. But when I was streaming the game and we got to close to the finale there was this one track playing in the background, that was a really nice downbeat loop. Kind of moody and atmospheric with a hint of blues jazz about it.

It’s this track, taken from adventuring in a Paris covered in monstrous caterpillar silk that I couldn’t get out of my head so pushed it to the producers to adapt. The end result is something downbeat and moody for a track that, honestly most people will never probably hear.

5) “One Beautiful Redhead” for OutRun Online Arcade

When you have a soundtrack as iconic as that from the OutRun series, how can you possibly stick to just one track? This was the problem I faced when choosing the track to do as part of the Last Minute Chilled series (we’d actually done a stream of it late last year on the channel, so it did qualify) – only to realise it should really be in the AAUK Collection anyway and of course I was going to pick Night Flight for that. You know, the track I’ve been harping on about for the last two decades.

Well, if we’re picking for option two you have to go with the classic trinity, And in that I’m sorry but Magical Sound Shower is always going to win for me, Honestly, it’s in the running for the best name for a videogame track in all of gaming. Well here we took MSS and said, what if our driver was out and about at night with the roads clear and the moon full in the sky. Just drifting around without a care in the world. Super chill background music for you to work to.

6) “Your Worst Nightmare” for Double Dragon Neon

Double Dragon Neon might be the most cursed stream we ever did. A co-op between me and Donnie everything that could go wrong did go wrong, which is a pity as we had a truly amazing art edit done by DoubleXXCross for the series. 

Needless to say co-op was more me on my own with sporadic appearances by Donnie that ended up more like surprise cameos. The internet connection be a cruel mistress, especially if you are chao with a reporter hat on, apparently. 

The soundtrack to Double Dragon Neon is amazing. An update and refresh of original tracks that sounds familiar and yet nothing like, even the little musical asides you get when you find out about new powers are 10-12 seconds of ‘I wish this would continue’.  Given we’d already done an adaption of the amazing Mango Tango for Volume 1 of Chilled (check out Slow Street Seduction) I wanted to try and work on what is again, possibly the best end credits song in gaming history and also give an opportunity to tip my straw hat to the incredible force that is Skullmageddon. 

The end result of trying to adapt Dared To Dream is actually quite simplistic and stripped down and leans more into the threat that Skullmageddon is – stop sniggering at the back, he TOTALLY IS – than perhaps Dared to Dream itself. A mix of the fall, the flair and the threat.

7) “Blissted” for Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing

I’ll be honest, So Much More is an odd duck to try and do as lo-fi. It’s super fast, has a lot going on, including, I might add, the dropping of a guitar.

This track, taking its name from the line “I’m cool in a twisted kind of bliss”, instead tries to incorporate some of the underlining melodies and loops turning them away from the rock and making what myself and the musician described as ‘taking a spacewalk to go shopping’. We’re not even sure where the shopping aspect came in, just that one of us said it gave them the idea of an astronaut floating through a mall and it kinda stuck.

8) “By The Light Of The Stars” for Raft

Goodness do I love Raft. Honestly it felt like Raft saved me at one point, it was my go-to for just existing and what a beautiful yet simple soundtrack.

There’s a bit in the film Porco Rosso where they’ve taken off and for a few seconds we’re immediately behind them. The plane in its element and just soaring through the sky towards the horizon like a boat on the water. Taking its musical queues from ‘Dreaming on the Sea’ and with this thought in mind we looked into the sky sequence you get on a calm night in-game and used that in order to shape the resulting beautiful track.

9) “His Might Upholds The Weak” for Sonic & The Black Knight

Black Knight is one of those Sonic soundtracks that somehow flies under the radar. I’ve seen a bit more love come Secret Rings‘s way over the years but Black Knight is far from the soundtrack that’ll come to people’s minds. Obviously Knight of the Wind is one of the best Sonic tracks full stop, but what could we focus on for an additional track?

So with the Black Knight tracks I’m actually doing a thing where we have one per Knight: Sonic, Shadow/Lancelot, Blaze/Percival and Knuckles/Gawain – I’m also doing a naming convention which is a reference to the ‘Old Code’ from the film Dragonheart. We’ve already had Sonic’s track on AAUK Collection and Blaze’s track on Black & Red Vol 2 which still leaves us Grumpy and Grumpy.

While Blaze had her own music, Knuckles and Shadow have shortened versions of their own Adventure era themes. So we take inspiration here from More To Be A Knight Than To Serve Your King, a track which plays when Sonic argues with the trio about a Knight’s priorities to the land. As you ‘might‘ have guessed this is then about Knuckles/Gawain accepting his King is in the wrong. Shadsalot will get his track down the way.

As More To Be A Knight… has the refrain from Knight of the Wind in there you might think its based on that but its really not. Given the scenario we put into His Might… a bit more of a sense of confusion and uncertainty, certainly it is more about reflection.

10) “Delicacy” for THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL

Can something chill also be kinda creepy? OVERKILL‘s soundtrack is another that people rather sleep on, so I wanted to do something else for it. This track uses of all things Dim Sum For Papa as its influence. It’s also relatively simple in the grand scheme of things but its great background material for you.

11) “The Principia” for Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

Using Ungravitify as an inspiration was always going to be tricky. But what we got was a pretty sweet track I described as ‘like watching the waves come in at night but being distracted by a high wind which is threatening to take your hat’. A strange description perhaps, but one I stand by!

The name incidentally comes from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – known as ‘The Principa’ for short for non-Latin speaking people. It’s the book in which Sir Isaac Newton expounds both his laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation.

12) “I Started A Croak” for Sonic Heroes

One of the earliest Turbo Drive Live let’s plays that we put up was Sonic Heroes: Super Hard Mode, in which poor Turbo took on the accursed game and nearly lost his goddamn mind in the process. His exponentially growing frustration during Frog Forest was the stuff of legend, but honestly I’m kind of a fan of Frog Forest, it’s bright and upbeat with suggestions that the place is pretty nice to relax if only you’d stop – but of course you can’t.

I Started A Croak, named in jest/honour of the Bee Gees song I Started A Joke, is another atmospheric-type track. With definite hints of magic in the air. Enjoy.

Extras is available now on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and many other places. You can also find it as part of the Instagram/Facebook and TikTok/TikTok Music/Resso/Luna music libraries.